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I had been making stuff with wire and sheet metal, but my boyfriend wanted a big, heavy ring, so I gave wax carving a try. Don't have the setup to cast myself, so I sent it out to a place in in NY. It came out kind of lumpy, but he likes it. the design is supposed to be a Game of Thrones Stark wolf.
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Aug 23, 2015 23:55
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| # ¿ May 15, 2024 16:47 |
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I just took a class at my old college in faceting. The first stone I completed was a piece of laser gem in this design I found online (the larger pink one below) https://usfacetersguild.org/faceting-diagram/amaryllis-1/ . I am pretty happy about the way it turned out (except for the little chip I knocked out of the back of it). Then, I took a brilliant cut design the teacher gave us, and cut a piece of amethyst. I thought it would be sparklier than the other, since the cut is called "brilliant" (and it is designed for quartz's refractive index). However, it kind of looks like it has half a window if bright light is not shining on it, and only the edge and half the inside sparkle at one time, as opposed to the "amarylis" design, which seems to have much more sparkle distributed around. The difference isn't showing as much in the photos, but in person especially, the pink one looks a lot more "fully lit" and sparkly than the amethyst). Did I cut it wrong? Is it the design? Is it quartz vs laser gem? Sorry about the quality of the photos, I was having trouble lighting it. 
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Oct 22, 2016 00:11
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Yeah, I know I'm being much more critical of it than the people I've shown it to. I was just google imaging "brilliant cut amethyst" and it's not as bad as some of the specimens people are charging for! http://web.tradekorea.com/product/219/942219/Best%20Quality%20Oval%20Brilliant%20Cut%20Facet%20Light%20Amethyst%20Spinel_2.jpg https://www.goldarts.co.uk/images/9...-1275_image.jpg
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Oct 22, 2016 00:48
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I made a wire-wrapped setting for the amethyst I cut! I have a question for those of you who sell your stuff: how do you figure out how to price things? I have a small etsy store, and I'm never sure if my prices are appropriate. I see some people selling junk, like a ring that's just a bead on a piece of wire without finished ends for like $16 and people love it, but then I see really nice stuff for cheap and I'm not sure. I guess the answer may be whatever people are willing to pay, but I'm just curious. Do you use a formula? Just go with what feels right? Something else?
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Nov 6, 2016 01:36
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Claes Oldenburger posted:Ultimately, it does comes down to what people will pay. You can spend a hundred hours on a complicated brass piece of jewellery, but to people brass will only be worth so much. The same applies to silver, and then gold it's sort of the skies the limit. Thanks for the advice! That ring you made for Neurostorm is absolutely lovely, by the way. Love the scroll work on the side. I finished a little piece of rose quartz last week, with this design: http://www.gemologyproject.com/wiki/index.php?title=Voltolini_-_Pandoro . The creator said it was made to complement the "glow" that comes from the haziness of rose quartz (rather than the sparkliness of a clear stone), and I like the effect. When I look at it in real life, the amount of light coming out of it is about halfway between the 2 pictures (one is with flash, one without).  The original rough was pretty large, but only a small, shallow portion of it was transparent enough for a faceted stone. It's been hard for me to decide if I would rather have a little bigger stone, or a smaller stone with less flaws!
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Nov 6, 2016 03:36
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Claes Oldenburger posted:
Is that a Portuguese cut? So sparkly!
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Nov 13, 2016 02:59
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cut a smoky quartz with lots of little bubbles in it. All the bubbles were kind of on the same plane, so I turned that toward the top and decided it was a feature instead of a bug.   edited to fix image littlebluellama fucked around with this message at 03:14 on Jan 2, 2017 |
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Jan 2, 2017 03:06
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Claes Oldenburger posted:Cut a tourmaline over the last week and a bit, picture sucks but the stone turned out great: This is from a while back, but did you find that there was a lot of color mixing in the light within the stone after you cut this (when you look at it head-on, i mean...obviously it looked yellow at that angle)? I have a piece of ametrine that is mostly citrine with just a bit of amethyst one one side, but it seems like such a nice deep purple I'd like to have it on one edge. My teacher in the faceting class I took says I should just forget the amethyst and cut it based on the citrine because the amethyst won't show up or if it does it will make the color "muddy".
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Jan 15, 2017 23:33
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My faceting teacher told me this rough is a topaz. It has a blue bump at the top (it's more obvious in real life when you can move it around), and he said natural blue topaz is rare. I don't know if I'm up to polishing topaz yet, but maybe in the future I'll try to cut into some kind of "fancy" shape that would preserve the blue area. Also if anyone recognizes this is actually a different kind of stone, let me know! 
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Jan 28, 2017 22:01
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Scarodactyl posted:It looks like topaz but I don't want to sound too certain from a photo identification. Topaz has perfect basal cleavage, just rotate the stone around in your hand and look for a directional flash. Thanks for the tip. Love those rose quartz pieces, and that big tourmaline with the white mineral is cool! JohnnyRnR posted:I'd agree with topaz. It has a distinctive silvery sheen. Interesting, I'll have to try that!
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Jan 30, 2017 00:23
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Two more questions about topaz: Is the flash I'm looking for like a reflection off a veil or a spot where it has already started to cleave, or is it more like chatoyancy? When I turn my pieces around under the light, I can see some spots like veils or separations, but I also see a sort of more general glowing flash, but I'm not sure if that's a reflection from the relatively smooth natural "facets" of the other side of the stone. Also: Most websites I've looked at recommend setting the cleavage plane about 9 degrees off the table. Is there any reason I shouldn't just turn it 90 degrees to the table so the cleavage plane would be on the girdle, which I don't polish anyway (or would this make the area near the girdle chip off)? thanks
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Feb 5, 2017 04:46
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Oh, and another thing: Claes, some of the rings on your instagram have faceted stones in bezel settings (which look really cool) Are these just really deep bezels to accommodate the pavilion of the stone, or is it open behind the bezel (with some sort of prongs or supports holding the stone far enough away that it doesn't dig into the finger)? Sorry if this question doesn't make sense, I've only bezel set flat-backed stones.
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Feb 5, 2017 04:53
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I've started taking a cabochon class, and I was surprised by how fast it goes compared to faceting. It's really fun to just go, do something a little more free-form, and come back with a handful of them. Here's what I've done so far: I'm going to try to get a better picture of this later, there's a lot going on in there.    This was the first one I did, and I'm really happy with it.  These kept sort of a waxy texture no matter how much I polished them, not sure if it's the composition of hte stone, or a technique thing I'll figure out later. 
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Sep 10, 2017 02:16
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I also had some stones I was told were sapphires, and while they were obviously "enjoy the novelty of saying you have a sapphire" quality sapphires, I was curious to see what was inside. They each had some sort of chatoyance/star. I had just polished the tops without trimming them down, I think I will try to get each one a bit rounder ( and see if I can possibly polish down past the holes and pits without ending up with just dust  ) but I kind of like the rough vs polished look and how weird they are.the most reddish one, kind of potato shaped because it was 2 crystals fused together  bluish gray, this one had the least resolved "star" more of just a flash. Don't know if I could improve it with a rounder surface, but the grain was not a hexagonal "ring" shape like the others inside  My favorite, looks lavender with little bits of pink, has the most defined "star." I think I will definitely try to shape the top of this a bit rounder and leave the bottom rough, I am already imagining this in some kind of big crazy sci-fi pendant. 
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Sep 10, 2017 02:54
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Thinking of sci-fi jewelry, I just realized I never posted this ring I made a while back, it was a "herkimer diamond" (double terminated quartz from herkimer county NY) I found on Ebay, and then spent way too long melting a bunch of little blobs of silver together. I assume the smart way to do this would have been casting.
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Sep 10, 2017 03:05
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JohnnyRnR posted:Keep at it etc. Thanks! I love the idea of being able to make something nice out of any stone. Being in NC, there's lots of quartz and other stones in the ground, and I have joined a local gemstone and mineral club. I am hoping to go on one of their field trips this year to a quarry. I know they've found fossils and some interesting minerals in the past.
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Sep 10, 2017 15:47
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Scarodactyl posted:These are classic Indian star sapphires and one of my favorite materials to cut (among many). They sometimes have sharp stars or even double stars along with a range of nice colors. A lot of them will develop very bad orange peel texture once you get to 600 grit on a normal wheel, at which point either loose grit or a specialty lap are needed. Conventional wisdom for stars is a high dome but with these near-opaque stones a low dome is often best. For the most part they won't cut super valuable gems but if you get one with a nice star, good color and not too many inclusions it can be a good gem. That's good to know. Thanks for sharing! That's what's fun about this forum, not only can you see what everyone is up to, there's so many knowledgeable people about any subject.
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Sep 10, 2017 15:51
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Scarodactyl posted:Oh cool! NC is a great rock state. Have you been to any of the gem shows? The season is sort of over at this point but we have some pretty good ones. I'm in Raleigh and have a lot of cabbing rough--I'd be happy to send you some if you drop me a pm. I helped out at my club's show this past April (Tarheel Gem and Mineral club) cutting geodes in half, that was pretty fun. Haven't had a chance to go to a meeting since then (moving and taking a pottery class on the same day as meetings), but I'm getting back into it now with this cabbing class. I went to Hiddenite, NC this past May to a place that lets you dig or pan in their creek, people sometimes find emeralds or even more rarely, the mineral hiddenite that the town is named after. They showed us some samples that had been found there. I found a bunch of crunchy quartz and mica but I did get a big chunk of mica clustered around a slice of quartz, and one cool piece that has mica coming out like those little crescent fungi that grow along tree trunks. Its kind of orangey from the clay, I tried to clean it, but I think it's embedded in it. I guess it wouldn't be North Carolina without a generous helping of red clay, haha.If I can't find something valuable, at least I can find something sparkly:   and a different angle to show the shine of the mica: 
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Sep 11, 2017 04:17
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| # ¿ May 15, 2024 16:47 |
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Scarodactyl posted:
Didn't know that. I was digging around in the forest area. Saw the spot where some guy found an emerald. He has staked out a claim and dug about 10 feet down into the ground, made his own little ravine.
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Sep 12, 2017 05:46
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